The sad march of a dead fireman's home to the torch: Phillip Morris

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A boarded-up house on Lampson Road quite recently belonged to a murdered Cleveland firefighter. Now, the structure is just another Collinwood fire hazard in the making.

The brick staircase at the front of the house has collapsed. Vinyl siding, which covers the wood of the two-unit structure, is discolored and buckling. The roof appears primed for kindling.

A passerby would never guess that Lt. William Walker, a commander in the city's fire department, lived in the house with Uloma Curry, his wife of two years. The couple lived there until the moment a discount hit man ambushed the firefighter in his driveway the evening of Nov. 3, 2013, as he brought sandwiches home for his family.

Ryan Dorty, 23, who has pleaded guilty to the murder, expected to be paid $2,500 for his gun work.

Uloma Curry sat in the Cuyahoga County courtroom of Judge Sherrie Miday last week. The widow was the face of stoicism as prosecutors argued she orchestrated murder to conceal her own financial fraud and to collect Walker's life insurance policy. She wasn't nearly always so stoic.

Curry placed a frantic 911 call moments after her husband was shot. She moved veteran firefighters to tears with displays of grief, as they used their personal vehicles to move her to an Ashtabula County home that Walker had purchased just before the shooting.

But Friday, she was stone-faced as she listened to Christopher Hein, an admitted liar, take the witness stand and described what he said were their dual roles in her husband's murder. She stared straight ahead as Hein, 23, a street gunrunner and drug dealer, detailed how he ordered the gun used in the shooting, and then subcontracted the hit after growing apprehensive about pulling the trigger.

His two-hour testimony offered jarring insight into the banality of his own internal debate concerning the murder of an innocent man.

I'm going to kill a man. She didn't pay me no money and I started thinking, I'm going to kill a man for nothing. He didn't do anything to me. He's a firefighter.

Rather than kill Walker, Hein found another willing neighborhood shooter. That decision is as close as he came to acknowledging the wretchedness of the cold-blooded murder. He and three co-conspirators, including Curry's then 17-year-old daughter, have already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Curry.

A jury will soon decide Curry's innocence or guilt. In the meantime, a boarded-up house on a short street in Collinwood bears the eerie trappings of countless city structures that Walker would have risked life and limb to save.